April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
T.S.Eliot
Over the course of the past year, I have witnessed more tears and felt the heaviness of grief more often than ever before in my life. As a chaplain in a hospital, I have sat with patients and patients’ family members in the midst of crushing news time and time again. It is never easy no matter how much time we have to prepare ourselves for it. When it finally happens, when we finally receive the crushing news, it is always crushing whether we have an hour, a day, a week, or years to prepare for it.
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
T.S.Eliot
Over the course of the past year, I have witnessed more tears and felt the heaviness of grief more often than ever before in my life. As a chaplain in a hospital, I have sat with patients and patients’ family members in the midst of crushing news time and time again. It is never easy no matter how much time we have to prepare ourselves for it. When it finally happens, when we finally receive the crushing news, it is always crushing whether we have an hour, a day, a week, or years to prepare for it.
Words
like hope and hopelessness, vitality and despair, heaven and hell can easily
remain little more than words among other words. They can easily remain
metaphorical concepts that we move and manipulate in the course a sentence in
order to formulate our grand theologies of hope and love. However, when such
words remain nothing more than concepts, they are empty of any sort of concrete
significance, and when they remain empty of concrete significance, they leave
the speaker of such words as nothing more than a parrot repeating useless
mantras while watching the rush of lava approach steadily after a volcanic
eruption.
If
our theological language never touches the ground, if our words never bespeak
experience, then they will be as cute as children in the schoolyard discoursing
about determination and courage. Those children are not necessarily speaking
lies by any means, but when they speak of determination and courage, it is not
the same in the least as when a sixty-seven year old migrant worker reflects on
his life or when a fifty-four year old Chinese lady tells the story about when
she moved to America when she was twenty-eight without knowing how she would
begin her new life. When the migrant worker and the Chinese lady speak of
determination and courage, their words are colored with their experience. They
have a knowing look in their eyes. Determination and courage are not mere words
to them. Determination is when that migrant worker would eat only one meal a
day in order to save enough money to buy his children shoes so they could go to
school and learn English. Courage is when that young Chinese girl got on the
plane and did not turn back to her parents waving goodbye. Their words have
real concrete significance.
These
past months as a chaplain in a hospital I have felt, experienced the
theological words so often used throughout my time in seminary. And I must
admit that theological concepts such as resurrection have felt distant; victory
has been far out of reach. In such moments – and they are many – what is the
function of theology? I have asked myself this again and again. In a clinical
context and more broadly in a medicated society, what is the role of theology?
I have not yet arrived upon a fully satisfying answer. However, I do think that
in order for there to be a satisfying answer, it must come in the form of
language and narratives that are full of experience, full of concrete
significance. It is only when such language and narratives are rich with
experience and concrete significance that they will have the capacity to frame
our hopeless situations with genuine hope-filled perspective. Imaginary lines
do nothing for a bleeding portrait.
